Loving Men: Aspects of Plato’s Theory of Eros in the Phaedrus

I

As the title suggests I am concerned with an ambiguity. The ambiguity I have in mind is simple to detect but difficult to fathom; it registers a double-faceted aspect in our understanding of love. Behind the surface distinction between men as lovers, as subjects or enactors of love, and men as objects or recipients of love, hides a less obvious one: that between love as a form of relatedness to other people and things (to the “other”, one might say), and love as a passion – love as a distinctive psycho-somatic upheaval, a “pathetic” condition.1 The former distinction – strongly marked in Greek as that between erastes and eromenos – seems pretty well confined to relations between men, each term indicating where in such a relation a given individual is situated. As well, however, the terms imply an origin and a destination, respectively, of the flow of a characteristic affect; “love” does not only name a relation but also, and at the same time, a directed or intentional passion. As Plato has Diotima say in the Symposium, love is not just a desire for what the subject of love does not have and wants; rather, love is the desire for that of which love itself is endees, it is a desire that marks a lack in one.2

Thus, though love can relate the erastes to the eromenos with mighty bonds, it does not follow that the eromenos himself is the “intentional object” of the love affecting the erastes. Indeed, for that to be the case we would have to imagine something along the lines of Aristophanes’ amusing speculation. We would have to think, in other words, that, since the lover’s love indicated what the lover needed, was missing, and required for the fulfilment and completion of a nature in him, the need was somehow for the beloved himself. Apart from certain metaphysical and religious conceptions of God as such an eromenos, it would very difficult to think of an appropriate description under which an ordinary erastes could place a claim of such magnitude on another ordinary eromenos. As an intentional passion eros is, then, not only a force which in the Empedoclean tradition operates in people, plants, animals, and the cosmos itself (a tradition to which Plato undoubtedly felt he belonged), but also, and crucially, a special kind of desire with a truly remarkable range of “intentional objects”; of items, in other words, in which the desire and, consequently, the bearer of this desire, might find fulfilment and completion.

Why, then, do most people think, speak, and act as if love was merely a force that binds two individuals, or an individual and several other individuals? More importantly, given the wide range of love’s intentional objects and the fact that it is a form of relatedness, how are we to understand the connection between these two facets of love? Specifically, how are we to characterise whatever it is in the eromenos to which the erastes relates in a way that make intelligible the nature and provenance of the emotion, one which, contingently and for a time, operates in the erastes?

These are difficult questions which cannot be dealt with in the compass of a short paper. I do believe, however, that Plato’s complex, multilayered, and often stunningly inspired reflection on love and friendship is dominated by a deep sense of the problem these questions pose. This sense surfaces explicitly, of course, in the Lysis, the Symposium, and the Phaedrus. But it would be a mistake to think that the impact of Plato’s reflection on Eros is not inextricably linked to his metaphysics, his theory of knowledge and cosmology, and, above all, his ethics and philosophical psychology. Socrates’ erotica as he pursues the highways and by-ways of the elenchos, I suggest, permeate the whole of Plato’s philosophical outlook.

It is important, therefore, not to misunderstand this reflection. One such misunderstanding is to be found in Vlastos’ well known criticism of Plato’s theory of love as one that excludes the love of individuals as whole persons, and only allows for “love of that abstract version of persons which consists of the complex of their best qualities”.3 Kosman’s article referred to above effectively answers Vlastos and, moreover, provides us with a correct reading of the way in which human eros for Plato is most properly auto-erotic. In this paper I am interested in a different misreading of Plato, one that seeks to break the unity and continuity of Plato’s reflection on love. I refer to Martha Nussbaum’s reading of the Symposium and the Phaedrus in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 1986), chapters. 6 and 7. My remarks mostly concern the Phaedrus and, in particular, the relation between the first two speeches (by Lysias and by Socrates) and Socrates’ second speech at 242c – 257b. What I have to say follows on from Kosman whose article, however, does not deal with the Phaedrus.

II

I begin by briefly rehearsing what Nussbaum extracts from her reading of the two dialogues:

1. According to Nussbaumthe Phaedrus contains a recantation of Plato’s earlier views (in the Republic, the Phaedo and also the Symposium), according to which “the appetites and emotions, particularly sexual feeling and emotion, were held to be unsuitable guides for human action. Only the intellect can reliably guide a human being towards the good and the valuable”. The Symposium, she suggests, “offers us a stark choice: on the one hand, the life of Alcibiades, the person ‘possessed’ by mania, the ‘madness’ of personal love; on the other, a life in which the intellectual soul ascends to true insight and stable contemplation by denying the mad influence of personal passion.” Nussbaum reads the Phaedrus as presenting us with a contrasting view: here it is philosophy itself that is a form of mania, not a merely intellectual activity, a condition “ in which intellect is guided to insight by personal love and by a complex passion-engendered ferment of the whole personality – they are necessary for the highest sort of insight and the best kind of stability” [all quotations are from p.201 of Nussbaum’s book].

2. Nussbaum claims that this new view of the role of feeling, emotion and particular love in the good life “represents a change on Plato’s part that is explored inside the dialogue itself: Plato embodies important features of his own earlier view in the first two speeches, and then both ‘recants’ and criticises these speeches”. This is because “the Phaedrus is a work in which Plato works out a more complex view of erotic motivations and accepts some of them as good; a work in which he admits that he has been blind to something, conceived oppositions too starkly; where he seeks through recantation and self-critical argument, to get back his sight [Quotations from pp.202-3].

I believe that this somewhat romantic picture of a Plato recanting his earlier views on love and its relation to the intellect is not borne out by the text. Rather, it seems to me, Nussbaum, guided by the sharp contrast she herself makes between the self-sufficiency of reason and the openness to contingency of human goodness – the driving theme of her book – projects onto Plato’s text her own stark oppositions between intellect and the passions, only to ‘find’ Plato in the Phaedrus ‘recanting’ these views.

There is, however, a rather different reading of the Phaedrus – one more sensitive to the dramatic context of the first two speeches and the transition to Socrates’ second speech – that affords us an interpretation of Plato’s view of eros in this dialogue which is at least continuous with, and, as I would like to suggest, complementary to, his earlier views. It is not that Plato has now a different and more complex view of personal love; rather, the topic of eros is itself complex, and its many facets and contexts, require a successively more elaborate account. This is especially so since, as we saw above, it is the connection between its being a form of relatedness and an intentional passion of potentially great creative force that needs elaboration and elucidation. In the rest of this section I shall give a brief sketch of such a reading.

It would seem on the surface that the Phaedrus is, as Nussbaum says, about mania. The first two speeches -that composed by Lysias and read to Socrates by Phaedrus, and Socrates’ first speech, playfully and maliciously given at Phaedrus’ insistence – denounce mania, while praising rational self-possession, sophrosune. Socrates’ second speech is premised on the thesis that mania is not, as has been said, a ‘simple evil’, but can also be a source of the highest good. Nussbaum thinks that Socrates’ recantation of his first speech marks a change of view on Plato’s part about eros and its connection with reason. She makes two mistakes here, the first no less important than the second, though I do not discuss it at length here. On the strength of a recantation speech that Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates, who is speaking in a particular context, she attributes to Plato a change of view about the doctrinal content of that speech. Even if such an attribution was all that was at stake, we would need a good deal more analysis of the context of that speech than Nussbaum gives us before we could draw any firm conclusions about what Plato thought. The other, and perhaps more important, mistake Nussbaum makes is that she interprets Socrates’ recantation as merely a change of belief, as a plain abandonment of a doctrine about eros. Such reading requires that Socrates’ first speech accurately reflects his previous, and now to be abandoned, view of eros. Indeed, we recall that Nussbaum takes it that both the first two speeches, Lysias’ as well as Socrates’, represent the doctrines of the “middle” dialogues and the Symposium. Such doctrinal view of the recantation seriously neglects its dramatic setting. If we look more closely at the clues provided by that setting at 242b 8 – 243e we get a very different picture of what is going on.

Socrates tells Phaedrus that he has sinned against Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, in making a speech which treats mania as a source of evil in the lover and whose bad consequences the loved one must bear. But it was Phaedrus who enchanted him into making it (242e 1: dia ton emou stomatos katapharmakeuthentos hupo sou elechthe). Perhaps he was enticed by Phaedrus’ admiration for Lysias’ speech to compete with Lysias for the young man’s attention. He did this by replicating the content of Lysias’ speech in a cleverer and more impressive manner. In that he succeeded, but at the cost of saying something blasphemous, and, therefore, doing something shameful from which he needs to purify himself. We recall that at 237a Socrates cleverly prefaces his speech by saying that he will cover his head and rush through his speech without looking at Phaedrus for shame. Socrates is quite aware that in trying to impress the young man he may be engaging in something not altogether fine. At the end of the speech his daimonion and his accustomed sign tell him that matters cannot be left where he proposes to leave them (242b 9); his conscience is pricked at the prospect of his appearing as someone for whom discourse about eros is confined to recommending a cost-benefit calculation about loving and non-loving suitors to those pursued by such suitors. And this from a man who (as we are told in the Symposium, 177d 7-8) knows nothing except ta erotica! Socrates’ commitment to and concern for eros is grievously belied by the speech he just gave. In this respect he has offended in precisely the way he himself (in the Republic, ii-iii) castigates poets and others for fashioning discourses and tales about the gods that are false to their nature. For he has produced a speech which is an unworthy utterance (anaxios legomenon, Republic, 388d). The recantation Socrates is about to undertake is not that of a doctrine or belief but of a deed whose special significance lies in the fact that it is an act of speaking offensively against eros by saying something about it he knows is false to its nature. In making love appear other than it is he has made it a lesser thing, thus diminishing the stature and awesomeness of one of the most creative forces in human beings and gods alike. For such an act he understandably feels shame and wants to make amends.

In spite of the extreme gravity of the topic, Plato, the supreme dramatist of discourse, presents us with a delightfully executed representation of a highly common situation often encountered in the social dynamics at work in close-knit groups of friends and acquaintances: A, who actually respects and admires B, succumbs to the temptation to say something derogatory about B in the presence of a small circle of friends; something that will amuse and entertain them because they know B. A’s remark, let us suppose, is witty and malicious enough in its content to fool anyone but those intimately acquainted with both A and B about the complex intention behind A’s remark. Such an innocent by-stander will take the laughter that greets the remark as evidence of its truth, not realising that to those in the know it is a “harmless” bit of fun; for neither they, nor A, believe that the remark truly represents how they think of B or, indeed, how B should be thought of. Nevertheless, having made the remark (and, perhaps, feeling somewhat guiltily excited by his own malice while making it) A may come to feel ashamed for having made it. For he reflects that the falsehood not of but in the remark is of the sort to cause others (potential innocent listeners to whom the remark may be subsequently conveyed) to think less of B, and, crucially, to misunderstand his own attitude and true feelings towards B.

I submit that, contrary to Nussbaum’s reading, Socrates’ ‘recantation’ and his reference to the story of the poet Stesichorus (243a – c) is of this kind; a taking back of a logos ‘that is not true’, not merely on the grounds of its falsehood, but because of the unacceptable and awful consequences for Socrates of its being taken as true by others. Its being so taken means, after all, that others may come to think less of love because of what Socrates said about it.

Socrates now (243c) makes it absolutely clear why his due palinode to Love, his head uncovered, must be made: “ Suppose we were being listened to (akouon tis tuchoi) by a man of generous and humane character, who loved or had once loved another such as himself. Suppose he heard us saying that for some trifling cause lovers conceive bitter hatred and a spirit of malice and injury towards their loved ones. Wouldn’t he be sure to think that we had been brought up among the scum of the people (nautais) and had never seen a case of noble (eleutheron) love? Wouldn’t he utterly refuse to accept our vilification of Love?” [Hackforth’s rendering]. We have beautiful complexity in this paragraph. Plato presents us simultaneously with, on the one hand, two perspectives on, or levels of, understanding of love and, on the other, how the one perspective looks to the other. There is A, the generous and humane understanding of love; there is B, the understanding of love expressed and implicit in the way lovers and the relations between them are talked about; there is C, the way in which the understanding of love given in B will appear to someone whose understanding is that of A. As Socrates says, it looks like an understanding formed and fostered in the context of the most lowly form of social relations, that of sailors squabbling over a bit of flesh; a vilification of love embedded not so much in a set of love-activities (though no doubt in these as well), but in the discourse that surrounds these activities. The Phaedrus, as we know, is undoubtedly about mania, but it is also (as we learn from 257c till the end) most certainly about discourse and the deep link between love and discourse; about what a loving discourse has to be whether that discourse is about love or about anything else.

We do not need, then, like Nussbaum, to take Socrates’ first speech as representing Plato’s earlier views, views which he is now about to jettison. Rather, we are presented with a certain mode or style of discourse about paiderastic love. It is a style that imitates that of speech-writers like Lysias (whether it is about love affairs or other matters that come up in litigations); a style which, presumably, curries the favour of young aspiring speech-making politicians like Phaedrus, who are vying for power and influence in the Assembly. The assumptions and presuppositions of such a style, its crass pragmatism and calculatedness, become dramatically highlighted when love is made its topic. For then we see that it is a style of discourse that of its very nature belittles the topics it addresses – like the discourse of those whose understanding of eros belongs to what I referred to as level B, that of the nautais. Plato most certainly has an axe to grind, but pace Nussbaum, it is not against his earlier views of love but against his old enemy, those aspiring to speech-making and leadership in democratic Athens.

What is the nature of this mode of discourse? In the present case it takes the form of allegedly moral advice to young boys to be wary of impassioned lovers and to cultivate in themselves the state of self-possession by engaging in non-mad affairs with older non-mad and self-possessed men; the thing is to avoid mad entanglements with possessed older lovers. Nussbaum (pp. 207-8) brings out nicely and convincingly what makes Lysias’ speech plausible and reasonable. She rightly asks us to imagine the advice to be given by a feminist to a young woman entering a male-dominated profession: to protect your clarity, autonomy, and self-possession avoid messy, emotionally draining, entanglements with more senior males. Quite so.

Unfortunately, what Nussbaum (and others) miss is the difference between Lysias’s speech and Socrates’ first speech. Admittedly imitative of the content of Lysias’ speech, Socrates’ is not just ‘better’ than the former; it contains something the other lacks. It not only gives the same kind of advice by calculating the harms a mad lover visits on the young man and the benefits that a non-erotic lover holds for him, it also spells out a certain conception of eros as desire on the basis of which the cost-benefit analysis rests and the advice given. From 237b to 238e Socrates, unlike Lysias, gives the sort of account of love and its powers that will most plausibly justify the kind of assessment of its benefits and harms offered in Lysias’ speech. Socrates reveals to us the iron fist in Lysias’ speech shorn of the velvet glove that conceals it.

Lysias, by contrast, is quite untheoretical. He avails himself of conventional behavioural observations about the conduct of lovers to persuade the young man whose sexual favours he seeks that he should grant them to him, the non-mad lover, rather than to the ‘possessed’ one. Lysias talks about mania and the conventional understanding of its effects in personal relations without even attempting to explain its nature. Socrates, however, talks very little about mania in his first speech. He concentrates, instead, on the contrast between the desire for pleasure and acquired judgement about what is best (237d) – the two sorts of guiding principles within us that we follow, which can come into conflict and result in the one dominating the other. “Eros”, on this understanding of it, turns out to be the name of the condition that marks the mastery of irrational desire pursuing the pleasure of beauty over judgement that prompts to right conduct. This is extremely important: the whole speech is an ‘under-cover’ speech, given at Phaedrus’ behest, and put in the mouth of a lover who is telling a cunning lie, for the man whose speech it is is in love with the boy but tries to win him by making out that he is not.

The theoretical account of eros, therefore, as the mastery of irrational desire over sound judgement, contains a double deception perpetrated on the recipient of the speech: the boy is deceived into thinking that this is the speech of a self-possessed man (and so deserving of his favours), but also, and more importantly, deceived into thinking that self-possession with respect to love consists in denying or repressing in oneself a form of hubris, of wantonness or excess. For, in saying that eros is nothing but a form of hubris, the speaker speaks falsely about what is in him, and misleads the young listener about the nature of love. Consequently, he misleads the young man about the true relation between love and self-possession; a misconception painstakingly corrected later at 253d – 256e.

The account of eros Socrates gives in this passage is interesting precisely because it leaves out so many Platonic elements. If anything, it has some surprising overlaps with Freud’s early distinction between the Pleasure and Reality Principles. And, given that it regards ‘eros’ as the name of the condition of someone whose judgement is over-mastered by desire, it has more in common with what Socrates in the Protagoras identifies as what ‘the many’ think is the condition of weakness of the will – a view subjected to thorough criticism in that dialogue. In other words, what Socrates presents here is the sort of account that underlies the view of eros as a weakness – the conventional notion of what it is for one’s judgement to be dragged along like a slave by erotic desire.

The account tells us that the state of irrational desire ruling over sound judgement, hubris (excess or wantonness), is a state that has many forms whose names vary according to the object the desire is directed at – ‘gluttony’, ‘dipsomania’, etc. When such desire aims at the pleasure of beauty “and has acquired from other desires, akin to it (suggenon) fresh strength, to strain towards bodily beauty, that very strength (romes) provides it with the name ‘eros ‘. Under this fanciful etymology lies the precise point of Socrates’ later recantation: it is a debased and false conception of eros, rustled up to bolster the speech of a deceitful lover intent on hiding from the object of his love the true marks of eros, by representing it as just a hubristic and wanton lust for bodily beauty- which he, the lover, being self-possessed, is ‘of course’ free from. The speech is a blasphemy precisely because the deceit about the nature of love is employed in the pursuit of gaining control over the other, of obtaining the other’s surrender by speaking falsely. But was not this structure of falsehood and deceit already embedded in Lysias’ speech?

Plato, I am suggesting, is exposing with consummate artistry the diminishing, debasing, and denigrating force of a certain form of speaking about eros. A number of recent scholars have had illuminating things to say about why there was this form of speaking in the culture.4 They point out how this way of speaking embodies an unease, a tension, in the culture between a positive attitude to paiderasty, and a fear of being, and of being seen as being, a passive receptacle of another man’s virility. Winkler, in particular, brings out well how in that culture it was not so much engaging in passive homosexual acts that was frowned upon or feared. Rather, the nervousness was primarily that experienced by ambitious men at the prospect of acquiring a certain reputation, a reputation that could be used by others to frustrate and defeat their aspirations to become influential speakers in the Assembly and political leaders in the city. The worry about the reputation was not everybody’s worry, but one only for those who wanted to gain control over the minds of the citizens. Responding to wanton desires was seen as a disqualifying attribute in a man who wanted to lead.

What Socrates recants, then, is not Plato’s earlier doctrines, but the fact that, succumbing to Phaedrus’ entreaties (charm?), he engaged in a mode of discourse (to compete with Lysias’ success with young Phaedros) that in its very structure and texture was falsely belittling of the nature and power of love.

Seen in this light the first two speeches in the Phaedrus lack some crucial ingredients of Plato’s earlier views in the Symposium and the Lysis:

i. The account of eros as a hubristic dominance of lust over sound judgement we find in Socrates’ first speech seems a far cry from Diotima’s characterisation of love as a desire for that of which the love is endees, a desire prompted in the lover by a lack located in himself. Consequently, there is nothing in this first speech of Socrates that is even remotely like what Kosman brings out so well in connection with the Symposium: that the proper object of erotic love is the oikeion kai endees, that which belongs properly to oneself but from which one has been separated.5 Missing also, therefore, is the crucial sense in which eros in the Symposium is auto-erotic, is self-love. For, the view in that dialogue is that love at the human level is the erotic self-striving which characterises all being: the desire of each thing to become what it is.

ii. In contrast to both the Republic and to Socrates’ second speech in the Phaedrus, Socrates in his first speech does not employ the schema of three parts of the soul, but that of two competing guides or principles of action, vaguely reminiscent, as we saw, of Freud’s Pleasure and Reality Principles. Emotion (thumos), analogous to Freud’s ‘affect’, is absent here. It is difficult to see how a Platonic psychology either of three parts or of two different kinds of horses and a charioteer can be accommodated by this stark struggle for dominance between an innate and an acquired principle. This is especially so when we remind ourselves that both the logisticon in the Republic and the charioteer in the Phaedrus are meant not only to be in control of the other two parts or elements of the soul, but also to have the task of recognising what is beneficial to all three and to the whole.

As I was arguing earlier, the discourse of Socrates’ first speech, like Lysias’, which it both imitates and exposes, is a discourse about eros, which in spite of the fancy trappings in which it is enveloped, is at bottom nothing other than a discourse of the ‘market place’, that of nautais. It is such a discourse that Socrates recants as an unworthy one, an anaxios legomenon. What he puts in its place is a speech of great beauty and nobility – one of the finest appreciations of love as mania in Greek literature, and, perhaps, all literature. It is not the task of this paper to follow the metaphysical complexity of its composition, or to fathom the depth of insight it contains. This will have to await another occasion.

I will end the theme of this paper, however, by highlighting an aspect of Socrates’ second speech which seems to add a complement to the auto-erotic view of love presented in the Symposium. As Kosman said about the latter’s view of Love, it is a kind of recognition; “it is seeing another as what the other may be, but not in the sense that he might be other than himself, but how he might be what he is. It is, in other words, coming to recognise the beauty of another”.6 As Kosman points out, this love is not one which unconditionally accepts how another’s accidental being presents itself; rather, it is one which calls the other to be his true self, a love which at once recognises and bids the other to be his true virtue and beauty. The Symposium, then, emphasises what at the beginning I called the “relational” character of love; it investigates its proper object and delineates its proper relations to the other. What the Phaedrus adds, concerned as it is with love as mania, as the psycho-somatic ferment that gives flight to the loving soul of the lover, is the complementary aspect of love as self-revelation. Love is this because it is an impulse in the lover to project aspects of his true self onto the other.

This important idea of love’s power of projection comes at the end of Socrates’ account of the cause and nature of love’s experience at 252c, and continues till 253c. Socrates tells us that each true lover selects a loved one “after the manner of the god in whose company he once was”. Thus, however different the loved ones selected by the followers of Zeus or Hera or Ares, and no matter how strikingly divergent the ways of loving expressed by souls of such different dispositions, they all learn or discover these ways “as they follow the trace within themselves”. The process is the same in all: “But all this, mark you, they attribute to the beloved, and the draughts which they draw from Zeus they pour out, like bacchants, into the soul of the beloved, thus creating in him the closest likeness (homoitaton) to the god they worship” (253a – b, Hackforth’s version). This journey of self-discovery by the lover, through the projection onto the loved one of what he conceives as the inner and hidden springs of the spiritual being of both of them, is what basically forges the bond between the lovers. There remains, we note, an important asymmetry between erastes and eromenos. For, however mutual the affection between the lovers, loving as a spiritual task, a psychic activity induced by mania, falls to the lover, not to the loved. But this loving activity generates a counterlove (anterota) in the beloved, one he does not recognise as love but calls it ‘friendship’ (philia). The loved one, says Socrates, “loves, yet knows not what he loves; he does not understand, he cannot tell what has come upon him; like one who has caught a disease of the eye from another, he cannot account for it, not realising that his lover is as it were a mirror in which he beholds himself” [255d 3- e 2, Hackforth’s version]. Love is, then, an “intentional passion”; it is directed at the true self, the beauty, of the other (the message of the Symposium) – a cognitive task. But at the same time it is also a showing forth, a revelation, of the true spiritual self of the lover in which the loved other is called to partake. Acceptance of such an invitation by the loved one is, in turn, a source of self-discovery in him.

What emerges from our reading of the Symposium and the Phaedrus is at least the beginning of an account of Plato’s theory of love which discloses its complex double-aspected nature. Unlike Nussbaum who sees a change of mind on Plato’s part, we can read the two dialogues as offering us a complementary picture of what love is and of how it operates at the human level: as a daemon, a metaxu, as a power that enables us to relate cognitively to the beauty of other things and people, and as a divine passion in us that gives us the impetus to show forth, and thus acknowledge, our true selves.7

University of Melbourne

My remarks are confined to men because Plato, both when he speaks of erotic relations and of passionate feelings, seems to have men and/or youths primarily in mind. Nevertheless, I believe that most of what I say would hold of women and of relations between women. Relations between women and men, on the other hand, may require some important qualifications, even though I believe the general thesis applies to them as well. [↩]